If the stakes are high across the hotel industry to deliver
service and keep up with shifts in guest preferences, no segment feels that
pressure more than the luxury tier. The top luxury brands in BTN's 2016
Hotel Survey found that balance, embracing technological enhancements and
modern aesthetic standards and delivering on personalized service.
Ritz-Carlton took the No.1 spot among luxury brands in this
year's BTN survey and also finished first in J.D. Power's 2016 North
America Hotel Guest Satisfaction Study. "Once you establish yourself as a
luxury brand that's going to deliver and execute on service, then you have to
not only deliver on expectations but exceed them," said Ritz-Carlton vice
president of sales John Harper.
Ritz-Carlton performed well in consistency, physical
appearance and in-room personal amenities. Harper said it has completed
renovations around the world. The Ritz-Carlton, San Francisco, for instance,
just gave a face-lift to its rooms, meeting spaces and lobby to meet "modern
standards of luxury."
The brand also received high marks for ease of arranging
group travel and meetings, its meetings facilities and its corporate rate
programs. Harper said the brand in recent years has emphasized engagement with
meeting planners and meeting attendees, as well as technology. "Technology
has become so critical to the success of events that you have to continue to
evolve and advance your tech—and that means being smarter with the sales
process and the [meetings and conference] process—and then when they're on the
property the customer having the confidence in our ability to execute,"
Harper said. "The expectation in the luxury space is that you're the best
at it and that you get it."
Second place Fairmont Hotels & Resorts finds itself
among the top three luxury brands for the first time since 2010. It earned top
marks for sales staff, data quality, public business amenities, in-room
business amenities and price/value relationship.
Fairmont, known for iconic properties, has to modernize
while preserving hotels' historical integrity. It's a challenge vice president
Jane Mackie said the brand has embraced, renovating about 75 percent of its
portfolio in recent years and integrating modern business needs in the process.
"Wi-Fi is probably the No. 1 thing that we've addressed
over the last 24 months," she said. "But it's also having more data
ports. Fairmont Royal York, for example, where we have 1,325 keys, is about the
equivalent of three New York City blocks and 20 stories high, so obviously we
need more data ports. Just buying more bandwidth in one section of the building
is not going to feed and provide enough access to the extreme ends of the
building."
The brand also addressed tech amenities in the guest rooms,
putting in "what we think is the right number of electrical plugs in the
right places … and then adding another 20 or 30 percent more plugs, because you
can never have too many."
Fairmont has also revamped its Service Promise training,
particularly as it relates to working with corporates. "The training
focuses on four key things: understand, anticipate, engage and deliver, which sounds
very simple," Mackie said. "But ... it's making sure … we have all of
the data available to share with them, [that] we've already pulled it together,
taken the time to understand and interpret it for the customer and then
anticipate what their needs may be."
In key markets where it lacks a presence, Fairmont expects
steady growth thanks to parent company FRHI's recent merger with AccorHotels.
Hotels in the luxury tier received the highest
scores in BTN's survey, but the tier's U.S. revenue per available room
growth from January through July was the weakest of any segment, up just 1
percent versus 3 percent for the industry overall, according to STR. The mild
RevPAR growth is partly the result of a drop- off in occupancy, which fell 0.7
percent year over year to 75.7 percent. Luxury hotels make up only 4.6 percent
of the total U.S. hotel rooms under construction in the United States,
according to STR, yet the segment is still running into the same issue as other
industry segments: supply growth outpacing demand growth.